Ariana Grande – ‘Petal’ review: conflicted pop songs under the spotlight

Between her profound emotional growth on 2024’s ‘Eternal Sunshine’ and her virtuosic performance as Glinda in the Wicked films, Ariana Grande would seem to have endless reasons to be grateful. Those works emerged from a year-plus spent largely out of the spotlight – a relatively long time by her standards. However, brought back in by the movies’ press cycle and her first world tour in seven years, she’s once again come under intense tabloid and social media scrutiny – around her relationships, her image, her body. In response, she’s described ‘Petal’, her eighth studio album, as “a little feral”, “an unfiltered rage that I think we all feel sometimes”. READ MORE: Tyla on her ethos as a new-age, African popstar: “We are all limitless” The album opens with the grand romantic synthpop of ‘Kiss Me’, which gestures towards hope amid the noise: “Society, desperate for remedy / Empathy, fix this reality / You know I don’t belong”. But from there, Grande turns to an emotion rarely shown in a pop song – ambivalence. On the lead single ‘Hate That I Made You Love Me’, she addresses an audience whose misunderstandings of her will seemingly never change: “Is it really my fault you all gave me y...